“Which leads me to the reason for my call,” she said. “I mentioned that my son has been renovating his house. He took a few before pictures, but I told him that we should do some more to really capture what it’s currently like. Then, when it’s done, we can take some more to show the difference.”
“Do you mean the boarding house?” I asked. When she’d first mentioned it, I thought she’d said she was renovating her own house. If it was Richie’s place that was undergoing the renovations, that certainly worked out in my favor. I wouldn’t have to talk my way into visiting; I had an open invitation, and if I was photographing the house, I’d be able to look around for a computer. Of course, I could just ask Richie again, but I liked the idea of snooping around in the place Hank had been living before he vanished.
“Yes. It’s such a beautiful place,” she said. “Historic. He bought it for a song because it needed a lot of updating. Well, you saw it. He’s done some, but he still has a ways to go. The kitchen needs redoing. The library. Several of the bedrooms.”
“I just bought an older house, myself,” I said. “A lot has been remodeled, but I have some things I want to do. Someday.”
“It takes a lot to bring an old house back to its former glory. So,” she continued, “the reason for my call. I want to document our progress and the changes. I thought I’d make one of those photo books as a gift for Richie. Before and after. What do you think? Is this a project you’d be interested in taking on?”
Several thoughts went through my mind. The first one was all about the photography. Did I have the right lens and lighting to do a quality job photographing an historical Victorian house? I quickly cataloged my lenses and equipment. If enough ambient light shone through the windows, I probably wouldn’t need a flash. My wide-angle had a 14-24mm lens. The 2.8 aperture qualified it as a fast glass, so it would work well in low light. As long as it wasn’t too dim. I could probably shoot the exterior with the same lens. I had a light stand, if I needed it, although I’d need a helper. Janice could do that. Or Richie. The forecast showed clear skies for the next forty-eight hours, so the morning light should be good. “Is tomorrow okay?”
“Perfect! I’ll let Richie know. He had his housecleaners there today, so everything should be in good shape.”
We agreed to meet at 7:00 the next morning, which left me plenty of time to try to track down Daniel Sanchez. I made the call to Mrs. Branford and filled her in on the plan to hunt down Hank’s former right-hand man. “Want to come along?” I asked.
“My dear, sweet Ivy, does a bird have feathers?”
I laughed. “I’ll take that as a yes. I’ll pick you up in fifteen minutes.”
After we hung up, I slipped on my coat, called Agatha, and went through the French doors off the kitchen and into the backyard. As usual, the little pug immediately spun around in circles, her little tail wound up like a curlicue. I waved my hand toward the corner of the yard. “Go potty!”
She went off, sniffing and circling, sniffing and circling, sniffing and circling until she finally found the spot she was looking for to take care of her business. And then she was off like the Tasmanian devil. I sat in one of my two Adirondack chairs and watched her as she ran this way and that, her short little legs and squatty body looking almost lean as she loped across the yard, then back again.
“Knock-knock!” I jumped, startled by the click of the gate and sound of Mrs. Branford’s voice. Her lounge suit tonight was navy blue. White stripes ran the length of the pants legs on either side. Her snowy white hair was coiled into perfect elongated curls and tonight—for the sleuthing occasion, I guessed—she wore sparkly diamond studs. She had been a teacher her entire adult life and her Jimmy hadn’t struck it rich, so my guess was that they were faux. Much more practical and the choice I always made, too. No one ever knew the difference. She was an elderly Sporty Spice. “I was going to pick you up!” I said, standing.
“I couldn’t wait,” she said. The expression on her face was priceless. If she were a little kid, she’d be rubbing her hands together with glee. “Let’s go.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I patted my outer thigh and called to Agatha as I walked to the French doors. I held the right door open for Mrs. Branford. Agatha trotted inside next to her, and I followed, locking the door behind me.
A few minutes later, Agatha was snug in her bed. I didn’t think our outing would take very long, so crating her wasn’t necessary. I reserved that for the times when I was gone for six or more hours. Agatha was a precious dog, but she wasn’t always trustworthy after a certain period of time.
We passed through the kitchen and into the garage. I opened the garage door and slid behind the wheel. Mrs. Branford circled around the car and got into the front-passenger side, propped her cane beside her, and promptly buckled up. She was a stickler for the rules. “What do you think Daniel Sanchez will tell us?” she asked as I backed out onto the driveway, hit the garage-door button again, and headed down Maple Street.
I had no idea and told her as much. I wanted to find out what state of mind Hank had been in when he’d crashed at his friend’s house. Had he been a man in despair? Had he been preparing to leave his son, his business, his life behind? “I am just hoping he can give us a little insight,” I said. “I don’t know Hank, but from what everyone says, he is a good guy.”
“He is not the kind of man to steal a fortune from a friend and leave town,” Mrs. Branford said. “There is no way that is what happened. There is more to this story.”
I nodded. “But what?”
“That, my dear, is the fifty-thousand-dollar question.”
By the time we arrived at Daniel Sanchez’s house, we still hadn’t been able to come up with any new scenarios. It was temperate for a January evening, even in Santa Sofia. Still, I’d donned a lightweight coat before we’d left and now, stepping out of the car at Daniel Sanchez’s house, I realized it had been a good decision. It had been twilight when we’d left my house, but as the light waned, a breeze had blown in off the coast. The temperature dropped and I pulled my coat around me. Better to be prepared. My mom had lived by that motto and had taught me well.
It was a clear night, but dusk had given way to nightfall and the darkness dropped onto the street like a blanket. Daniel’s daughter, with her new shoes, had said that her dad worked the day shift at Crenshaw Company and got home every day around dinner. It was 6:30 now. Light gleamed from each of the windows in the house, vertical blinds slatted just enough to block passersby from seeing inside. Faint shadows moved around for a moment behind one window, and then vanished.
A single porch light illuminated the front stoop and for the second time, Mrs. Branford and I walked up the short path to the Sanchez house. “Second time’s a charm,” she said.
“If we’re lucky,” I said, hoping we hadn’t jinxed our success. Had Daniel Sanchez’s daughter mentioned our visit or would showing up on the doorstep after dark, two strangers looking for his former boss, be a complete surprise? How would Daniel react?
“Hank is a good judge of character,” Mrs. Branford said. “Look at Mason Caldwell. That man might be curmudgeonly bugger, but he’s got a big heart. Hank sees that.”
I’d had my hand up, ready to rap my knuckles on the door, but I stopped short. She’d said curmudgeonly as if it were a good thing. I turned to her. “You do like him,” I said, suddenly feeling like a middle-school student teasing her best friend.
She didn’t refute it, only smiled mischievously. “Knock on the door, Ivy,” she said.
Oh yes. There was most definitely a twinkle in her eyes.
Mrs. Branford and I both jumped as the door behind us wrenched open suddenly. I turned and looked up at the man looming there. “Mr. Sanchez?” I asked, offering a sincere smile.
He was a tall man. Slick-backed dark hair, a blue-collared shirt, blue jeans, and a thick mustache over his lip. He didn’t return my smile. “That’s right,” he said.
No small talk. No pleasantries. My hope tha
t the conversation would flow easily waned, but I forged ahead, introducing Mrs. Branford and myself.
“You were here yesterday,” he said. “My daughter told me.”
He made no move to open the door and invite us in. Mrs. Branford leaned on her cane, her hand trembling. “Yes, looking for Hank,” Mrs. Branford said, affecting a shaky voice. I smiled. She was good at putting on an act for the sake of acquiring information.
Daniel Sanchez looked her up and down, frowning. “Do you need to sit down?” he asked.
She lifted her hand, the handle of her cane clutched in her thick-knuckled hand. “What a sweet boy,” she said, her voice still quivering. “Thank you.”
He looked over our shoulders, as if a bench or chair would appear behind us. When it didn’t, he looked over his own shoulder, grabbed the doorknob, and stepped back. Daniel Sanchez seemed less than thrilled that we were on his doorstep, but as Mrs. Branford took a gingerly step forward, he put one hand at her elbow and the other behind her back, carefully ushering her over the elevated door frame and into the entry of the house. Chivalrous. It was the only word that came to mind.
I followed them in, closing the door behind me. I was not Emmaline Davis, deputy sheriff, but I did my best once-over scan of the house, quickly taking in as much as I could. It was clean and neat. A few photographs hung on the wall to the right. A staircase leading upstairs was straight ahead. A bench sat against the wall just beyond the front door, several pairs of shoes lined up underneath it.
I glimpsed a bit of the kitchen all the way down the main hallway in the rear of the shotgun-style house and, to the left, sat the main family room. The TV was on a SpongeBob SquarePants episode. The girl who’d answered the door reclined on the back of the sofa, her eyes glued on the cell phone in her hand. A younger boy, maybe nine or ten, sprawled on the floor, eyes on the television. Neither one cared a bit about the two women now talking to their dad.
If there was a Mrs. Sanchez, she wasn’t in plain sight, but a moment later, clanking came from the kitchen. I guessed she was the one jostling around in the back of the house. Daniel Sanchez situated Mrs. Branford on the bench and turned back to face me. He scooped his hand through his hair, making it stand on end. “Since you’re here again, I guess you’re still looking for Hank?” he asked.
Good deduction. “We’ve been trying to figure that out for a few days, Mr. Sanchez,” I said.
“Danny,” he said.
Mrs. Branford spoke up, her voice no longer trembling. “We have a few theories, Danny, but other than that, we are still very much in the dark. We know he stayed here with you for a while. We are hoping you might shed some light on his state of mind.”
Mr. Sanchez—Danny—closed his eyes for a long second. As he opened them, he drew in a deep breath. “He was pretty broken up after Brenda and Phil. He didn’t want to stay in his house. Couldn’t stay there.”
“We had to help him,” a woman said from behind me.
I spun around in surprise and came face-to-face with an attractive, dark-haired woman. She was several inches shorter than me, wore loose jeans, and a plain-colored T-shirt.
Danny looked miserable, but he swept his arm toward the woman. “My wife, Nancy.”
Nancy wiped her hands on the floral terry dish towel clutched in her hands, nodding at us. “You’re trying to find Hank?” she asked us.
“Trying being the operative word,” Mrs. Branford replied. “Did you have any idea he was thinking of running away?”
Her choice of words sounded funny, as if Hank were a child instead of a grown man.
Nancy glanced for a moment at the pictures hanging on the wall. “I guess we all have something to run away from.”
Her words were weighted down, as if they were being pulled straight from her heart, falling to the floor with a thud. I followed her gaze to the photos. They were school pictures. The girl and boy in the family room, and the older boy. The boy who I hadn’t seen here in the house. Had he run away? Or died? Wherever he was, or whatever had happened to him, I felt Nancy Sanchez’s pain into the depths of my soul. I’d lost a mother; but it was clear that somehow she’d lost a child, and that was the worst pain imaginable.
Danny took his wife’s hand and gave it a tender squeeze. He began speaking, his words coming slowly. “We gave Hank a place to stay while he got back on his feet. He’s been good to me, you know?”
Nancy nodded her head, her lips pressed tightly together. I got the impression it was her way of trying to keep her emotions in check. “He was a good boss for Danny,” she said.
Danny rooted both of his feet to the floor, rocking back on his heels slightly. He’d let go of Nancy’s hand and now folded his arms over his chest. “He taught me his business,” he said. “It’s just too difficult to compete with the big growers. He tried to keep it together with the private-restaurant contracts and local organic markets, but that hasn’t ever been enough.”
Nancy looked at us, her eyes wide. Imploring. “You need to find him,” she said. “Jason? He’s grown up, but everyone needs their father.” Her lips tightened into a thin line again, as if to bolster her strength. “And every father needs his son.”
The sentiment hung between us for a moment. Their loss was rooted deep and I wondered what had happened to their other child.
Mrs. Branford had been a teacher for half a century and had sons of her own. I could see the empathy on her face as she looked at Nancy Sanchez, as if she could completely relate. She held her cane upright, clutched the handle with one hand, reaching out with her other and letting her fingers flutter against the back of Nancy’s hand. “I lost my only daughter,” she said, her voice quavering, and this time I knew it was for real. “You never get over it, do you?”
Nancy shook her head, her eyes pooling.
My breath caught in my throat. I looked at Mrs. Branford. She had a melancholy expression on her face and I instantly felt my eyes get glassy with tears. I wanted to sink down next to Mrs. Branford and hug her. She hadn’t told me that she’d had a daughter. That she’d lost a daughter. In all my turmoil over the last months and my struggles in dealing with my own grief, I was shocked that she hadn’t shared this thing that clearly connected us. And yet, I realized, it wasn’t about what might have helped me in that moment. It was her story. Her life. Her loss. And I respected that it had, until this moment, been her secret.
She didn’t actually speak to me, but I could almost hear her in my head softly saying, “It’s a story for another time.”
Nancy ran the backs of her fingers under her eyes to clear away the tears pooling there. “Never,” she whispered.
Danny squeezed his wife’s hand again. He cleared his throat before speaking again. “Hank visits his father every day.”
Nancy’s eyes widened. “Dios mio,” she said, making the sign of the cross. “How could I have forgotten that? Poor man. He’s probably worried sick.”
“He has a father around here?” I asked. No one had mentioned that fact. Not Brenda, not Phil, not Alice. What else did we not know about Hank?
“At an old folks’ home,” Danny said matter-of-factly.
Mrs. Branford looked as shocked as I felt by the news. “His father doesn’t know his son is missing?” she asked.
Danny shrugged helplessly and I could see the blanket of burden fall over him, the one that made him feel that he needed to go see Hank’s father. To let him know Hank was missing, and to possibly prepare him for the worst.
“We’ll do it,” Mrs. Branford said. She pressed her hand firmly on the cane handle and propelled herself up to standing. “You should not have to do that.”
Nancy’s shoulders sagged in relief. “You will?”
But Danny’s brow furrowed. “I’m Hank’s friend. I should go.”
Mrs. Branford jumped on his obvious reticence, but I spoke first. “No, no. You stay with your family, Mr. Sanchez. Danny,” I corrected. “We’ll go.”
“We need the address,” Mrs. Branford said, alr
eady turned halfway toward the door.
Nancy straightened up. “I have it. Remember?” she said to her husband. “He came by, what, two weeks or so ago?”
Danny thought about it. “That sounds about right.”
Nancy turned to Mrs. Branford and me. “He left a business card here in a pile of his receipts and things. He was trying to help a teacher or something,” she said. She slipped her fingers along her temple and into her hair. “Now, where did I put it?”
“What teacher?” I asked, immediately wondering if it was Mason Caldwell. He had been a teacher, and Hank seemed to think Mason needed help.
“I don’t know his name. Someone he recently ran into again, though. An old teacher from high school, I think. Here’s the thing about Hank,” Danny said. “He wants to do everything he can for everybody else. Sometimes that interferes with what’s best for him.”
Danny nodded. “Right. So anyway, Hank hadn’t seen the guy in years, but he still recognized him. They got to talking, and Hank told him about Brenda. The teacher—what was his name?” He shook his head, drawing a blank. “Anyway, this teacher told Hank where he’d been living and said there was a room. Before we knew it, Hank was leaving here and moving in there.”
Nancy picked up the thread of the story. “I started making Hank a few dozen flour tortillas every week. It’s hard to go from your own house and home cooking in your own kitchen, to nothing. I wanted him to feel loved.”
“Right,” Danny said. “Flour tortillas for Hank, and then you started making corn for his dad.”
“They’re healthier,” she said, as if she needed to explain the reason Hank’s dad got the corn tortillas.
“And better,” Mrs. Branford said.
Nancy flicked her gaze to Mrs. Branford. “I agree,” she said, and then she continued with her story: “Hank came by one day to get the things he’d left behind. He picked up some tortillas. Said he’d decided the boarding house was fine for him, but he thought his old teacher would like the place his dad is at.”
Crust No One Page 17
